I deny it. I deny everything. In particular, I deny being the author of the erotic bestseller The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. I liked the book. It was surprisingly well written, and I knew it would sell by the truckload. But when the Sunday Times rang me up and announced it was about to expose me as the author hidden behind the pseudonym ‘Belle de Jour’, you could have knocked me down with a feather.

For a start, I am not a woman. And I don’t do fiction. And Belle’s book, which was already on its way to a second life as the ITV drama series Secret Life of a Call Girl, starring the pneumatic Billie Piper, contained a lot of material that was quite new to me. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t done the things described in the book. In many cases, I hadn’t even heard of them.

The man from the Sunday Times was confident and persuasive. He knew he was right, because the computers had analysed the writing of hundreds of authors and pinpointed my style as being identical to Belle’s. If the facts hadn’t been entirely against him, I might even have been convinced.

So who had done this analysis? A professor at an English university, but I couldn’t be told his name. Which university? The reporter could not reveal this information. What was the analysis based on? Oh, various factors. Like? Well, vocabulary, sentence length, use of dashes, number of commas, adherence to strict, rather old-fashioned grammatical rules, fondness for irony and so on.

In the end, I told him to shove off and he put the phone down.

But he was, in fact, quite close to the truth.

I had been in touch with Belle—the Sheffield University PhD student, Brooke Magnanti, who had financed her doctorate by working as an upmarket prostitute in Central London—and been one of several people who urged her to expand her original blog into a full-length book. I had even had one unexpected conversation with her, by email, about Pamela and Clarissa, the two mid-18th-century epistolary novels by Samuel Richardson

I suspect the journalist who called me had got a whiff of this connection and that the literary analysis gambit was simply a cover story to get me on the line, in the hope that I would break down and confess my identity as the author.

I was reminded of all this recently, when a young author I’ve been helping was suddenly thrown into a spin by spotting a clause in her contract that required her to confirm that she had not made any use of AI in writing her quirky, sexy, well-informed and largely autobiographical novel.

She had used ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot at various stages—to suggest examples, to help her shape her story-lines and to check for continuity errors. Now she was terrified that some all-knowing AI detection program would sniff out her background use of these new technologies and get her into serious trouble.

She had, of course, employed the AI resources alongside many other more familiar tools that every writer uses—things like a pen, a laptop, a thesaurus, a dictionary, Google, even a desk. No one would dream of picking a fight over the use of these support technologies. But just because AI is new and little understood, it is being singled out for special treatment.

The key point, surely, is whether the eventual output is good, imaginative and original. How a writer gets there should not matter a jot. All of us pinch phrases, jokes, stories, insights and ideas about settings and character from our favourite authors, and anyone who lays claim to pristine originality is simply self-deluding.

Using AI to check for plagiarism is entirely justifiable. Abusing it to intimidate today’s writers so they are afraid to exploit the tools they have to hand is unforgivable.

Besides which, the sniffer tools that are currently available are woefully crude and unreliable. They look at factors like ‘burstiness’ (the mix of sentence forms and lengths) and ‘perplexity’ (the level of dull predictability in the phrasing), plus a couple of slippery, highly subjective elements like the degree of personal detail, humour and emotional complexity that shows up in the text.

Just to test how this works out in practice, I put the first draft of this blog through Originality.ai , the self-proclaimed ‘industry-leading’ AI detection scanner.

It thought my blog was probably human-generated, and declared that it was 54 per cent confident that this was so.

I am not impressed. Are you? Originality.ai was fractionally more inclined to think this text was created by a person than by a machine. Whereas I would have thought that anyone over the age of ten could identify it with absolute certainty as human-generated.  To be fair, one rival scanner, Copyleaks, declared firmly that 0 per cent of  my stuff was AI-sourced. But it seems obvious to me that we are dealing with some new technologies here that are not yet ready for use in any sort of serious business context.  

For the moment, then, it seems as if anyone who tells you they can definitively spot AI input is bluffing. And the same goes for recognising the ghostwriter’s touch.

We aim to be anonymous and to capture exactly what our authors would write if they had the time, patience, understanding of structure and verbal dexterity to write their books unaided. We adjust the wording, sentence forms and grammar we use, in all sorts of subtle ways, to echo the speech patterns of our authors. And we help them shape their books to reflect the way they feel about their subjects. But I very much doubt if any current AI tool could detect traces of my voice running through the last ten books I collaborated on.

With both ghosting and using AI tools, the big question is, ultimately, whether an author is somehow cheating the reader. But the answer is simple. If the book that emerges from the process is readable and distinctive—if it could not have been produced by anyone else—it has as much right to its place on the shelves as any of the 200,000 titles that will be published this year.

Ian Shircore is the author of 16 books, including the 100,000-selling Conspiracy and So Brightly at the Last, a study of the poetry of the late Clive James